


You Didn't Hear That Coming?

by writedeku



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Clint is Deaf, M/M, Pietro has a temper, SO, but that's from the comics, heh, natasha is overprotective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-10
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2018-03-29 21:47:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3911824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writedeku/pseuds/writedeku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pietro Maximoff has a temper, and can't stand when Clint Barton pretends not to hear him. </p><p>In which Pietro learns something about not jumping to conclusions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Didn't Hear That Coming?

**Author's Note:**

> Hi guys! This is my contribution to the steadily growing Hawksilver fandom. In this one, Laura is Clint's sister. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Pietro isn't dead.

He slams the fist of his hand into the wall, and hears a satisfying crack resound through the small hallway.

Then the pain lances up in him like a white hot blade, and he gasps, biting his lip hard.

 _That stupid punk,_ he thinks, and is almost angry enough the slam his hand into the wall again, despite knowing it might put off his shots.

The world was still reeling from the effects of Ultron, and while he had bigger fish to fry, here he was, sitting in the narrow hallway of the medical ward, waiting for news.

Any news would be good at this point in time. It seemed that he was useless. All he could do was sit around and wait, wait, wait, for something to happen.

For someone with superpowers to show up and grant a miracle. Oh, hey Vision, you got healing powers? No? Fuck you.

He bites his lip again as he sinks into the cold metal chair.

They had been in there, the surgery room for over an hour.

He doubted Helen Cho's technology, even after it created an entirely new, part vibranium part human body from scratch.

Why the hell did the kid decide to take those bullets for him? He was a washed out, old, and useless spy who decided to join the Avengers, despite being out of place amongst all those powered up gods. Fuck, even Natasha could get the Hulk to calm down. What could he do? Right. Beat everyone at darts and Mario Kart.

His arm throbbed where the robots had sliced him, his head hurt where he had taken knocks, hell, even his stomach hurt where he had taken a stone pillar, and he was sure he had twisted both his ankles.

Still, he hadn't gone to see his injuries treated, he sat here, on this cold metal stool, hoping to hear that somehow that punk had made it out okay.

The door opened with an ominous screech, and Hawkeye winced, despite his dulled hearing.

He stares at the shoes of the person, and realises with a start and a shout that they're wearing Adidas shoes. He tumbles off the chair and stares at the person opposite him.

It's Pietro, stained with blood and grime and god knows what, his shirt ripped and bloody, his hair a mess and partly red, but it's him and he's alive.

Clint can't breathe.

He takes a ragged breath, and stares at the speedster. Then he raises a hand, and Pietro smirks, but then it comes down in a hard slap that echoes throughout the hallway.

"Don't you ever do that again," the spy seethed, finally feeling the effect of his injuries. "Don't you ever fucking dare to do that to me again."

Pietro laughs and raises his arms slightly, and Clint can see the faded and puckered white scars from his injuries. "I can tell the difference," Clint says, and points. "Helen's tech didn't cover it."

Pietro looks down in surprise. "We didn't use Helen's technology, old man. I have accelerated healing."

Clint sways. "You do?"

"Yeah, I do. Only me, though. Not Wanda. Part of the whole faster metabolism thing, I don't really get it," Pietro laughs softly. "Were you worried about me?"

"But your sister felt you die," the words tumble out of his mouth in their haste to escape. "She felt you die."

Pietro shrugs. "I guess she felt only my pain, not the actual, you know, the whole dying bit."

Clint glares at him. "Right, okay, I'm going to the medical room."

Pietro stares. "You mean you haven't? Listen, I didn't save you for you to die immediately after."

Clint waves a hand and staggers. "I'm fine," he slurs. "Very fine."

The man looks at him critically. "I may not have known you for a very long time, but you do not look fine." Pietro steps forward and scoops the now limp and dizzy Clint off the floor, bridal style. "I'll get you there, just you hold on to your dentures, old man."

If Clint had been any less deluded, he would've realised what was going on and been mortified, but right now he was concentrating on not throwing up all over Pietro's well-muscled arms.

The room accelerates, wind blowing into Clint's face and stealing the air from his lungs, and he panics as the one thing that is his own, his sight, is stolen from him in a blur of tears and air. The whole thing lasts about five seconds, but it's a nightmare for Clint, when what limited hearing he has is covered with the rushing of the wind and his eyes are tightly closed.

When the world slows down, back into focus, he scrambles free with what strength he has remaining and staggers away from Pietro, breathing hard. "How- how do you live like that? How do you see? How do you breathe?" He asks, and Pietro flinches. He's struck a nerve.

"I guess it's just normal for me," Pietro shrugs. "It's like asking you how you shoot."

Clint shakes his head, causing the room to spin more and him to slid further down the wall he was leaning on. "No, I learnt that. This is different. Not bad different, not for you, just different."

Pietro eyes light up at his statement of not bad. "You really think that way, old man? I could get used to your company."

Clint shivers and his voice slurs as he stumbles into the ward, where a concerned looking brunette immediately starts badgering him for waiting too long. "Just never again for me."

**XxX**

Pietro can't understand over the next few days why Clint had been so cold. What had Clint experienced that had caused him to react that way? Why never again?

He walked into the living room and noticed the archer standing at the end, sharpening his arrows. "Agent Barton?" He calls, and Clint doesn't stir.

He doesn't even look up. Pietro looks for a sign of earbuds, or headphones, but there are none. He taps his finger against the glass coffee table, but there's still no reply.

He feels his quicksilver temper start to bubble. "Agent Barton!" He yells, and finally the archer looks up.

"Pietro?" Clint asks, surprised and unnerved. "What are you doing here?"

Pietro glares at him. "Why didn't you reply earlier?"

Clint tilts his head and sets down the arrow he was making. "When?"

 _Why is he staring at my lips?_ Pietro thinks, noting the slant of the archer's eyes.

"When I called you earlier." Realisation dawns in Clint's eyes, and he twitches slightly. "I didn't hear you."

Pietro laughs. "No shit," he says, grinning, and Clint stops reading his lips long enough to appreciate the way that grey jumper showed off the kid's arm muscles.

Clint is, for some reason, too ashamed to really tell Pietro why he couldn't hear him. I'm part deaf, Pietro, and that's why I couldn't hear you. Joy!

The disability was just another thing that set him apart from the gods that lived here. Sure, even though Tony Stark might have shrapnel in his chest just that close to his heart, Steve might be from the 1940s, Thor and the Vision might not even be human, Wanda might be prone to losing control of her powers, Pietro and Bruce might have a temper and Natasha might be sterile, Clint was sure that they didn't really need him.

They were so much higher up than him on the food chain.

"So why couldn't you hear me?" The kid enquires, and Clint freezes. "Too obsessed with your arrows?"

Clint loves the way Pietro's accent stumbles on some words, the way it makes everything so different and so unique. He loves how he can hear it, lilting and musical, even with his shit hearing. He hates the way it makes him feel, the way it makes him want to hear more.

"Suppose so," Clint forces a laugh. "I work better with them than people."

He scans the table for his hearing aids, and resists the urge to frown in dismay when he sees he didn't bring it out.

"Something wrong?" Pietro asks, and Clint nearly swears because he's forgotten how observant the kid is.

Clint sighs as his legs fold out beneath him and he sinks back heavily into his chair. "It's just been a long week." There is no lie in his voice. The governments of the world were still shocked by the aftermath of Ultron and the aftermath of the Hulk, and if the location of the new Avengers facility hadn't been cloaked by some stealth technology the Vision and Tony worked on together, he was sure it would've been blown to bits in a "gas leak".

Pietro smiles slowly. "True, but me and Wanda have a home, and that's more than I can say for the other Sovokians. You saved us, you know."

Clint feels the warmth bubble in his chest. "It was my job," he says, stiffly. "I do what I have to do to make sure I still have a world to come back to."

Pietro takes a seat opposite him, brown eyes glinting with amusement and understanding. His fingers drum out a beat on the table. "It's more than a job, isn't it, old man?"

Clint looks at him, really looks at him, past the layers of anger and distrust, and sees a Pietro who is afraid of the future and who is afraid of the past and is afraid of who to turn to.

He stands up and ruffles Pietro's hair. 

"You'll do good," he says, and means it. "You'll do very good." Then he walks out of the door, grabbing his arrows and leaves the kid alone in a stunned silence.

**XxX**

Clint hates the way Pietro makes him feel, as if he was sixteen and stupidly in love.

It started off as a slow burn whenever Pietro laughed at something he said, and his laugh was tinged with his accent, and if it wasn't music then Clint didn't even know what music was.

It moved into a pool of warmth that flooded through his veins whenever Pietro gave him that stupid smile, half tilted at the side in a sort of smirk.

It bubbled when it saw Pietro with a five o'clock shadow, longing to run his hands over the stubble. Now it seemed to envelop him in a haze of warmth, as if he was wrapped in a large, fluffy blanket every time Pietro did something remotely cute. Be it his small laugh he would immediately mute, another one of his ghosts he carried with him from Hydra, or his tendency to stumble over large words.

But despite his guarded and closed affection for this kid, Clint still hadn't told him his disability. He reasoned that Pietro would find out soon enough (he had already hacked into SHIELD files- Tony was ecstatic) and it wasn't as if Clint's medical records where hidden.

All it would take was a sudden curiosity- He didn't get to finish the thought.

A body slammed into him and he tumbled over and over before finally coming to rest with his feet up and his head on the floor.

He flips over to a crouch with ease and turns to find Pietro staring at him with a downright bloodthirsty expression on his face.

Did he mention the kid had a temper?

"I've been calling you from the doorway for ages, old man," Pietro fumed. "If you're ignoring me, just say so, goddammit."

Clint leans back on his haunches. "I'm not ignoring you," he says calmly. "I couldn't hear you."

"That's your excuse every time. But I never see you that way with Romanoff or Stark. Why?"

Clint tenses. "Because I hear them?"

Pietro's fingers are racing. Clint can see them moving faster than the human eye, a pale blur. "What do you mean, you hear them?" Pietro raises an eyebrow. "You mean you can't hear me? Do I have to be louder?"

"Yes," Clint says, because it's the truth, damnit. "I'm sorry."

Pietro eyes him thoughtfully. "Okay," he relents. "I'll try to be louder next time."

Clint is visibly surprised at the lack of conflict. "That's it? No cuss words? Did someone put you up to this, because I swear-"

"No one put me up to this," he laughs, already retreating out the door. "Is there a reason why you should think so?"

Clint thinks of the ongoing prank war between him and Stark. "No reason," he says at the receding figure, then stops. "Wait! What were you calling me for?"

**XxX**

Clint is a few minutes late to the meeting that Pietro was supposed to bring him to and has to endure Fury's stink eye from across the meeting room the whole time. Normally he would leave behind his hearing aids and if anyone asked why he didn't do part a to d he would say he didn't hear them and cackle, but he was going to wear them 24/7 now. He was so goddamn afraid of Pietro thinking he couldn't do his job because of it- and not just that punk either, but everyone in general. After his spectacular uselessness in the fight against Ultron, Clint's not taking any chances.

So when Pietro and Wanda start talking in low voices in the living room, not knowing he'd just entered behind them, he can hear what they're saying down to the small flick of their tongue on the harsher sounds.

"I'm worried about him," Pietro mutters, settling into the new squishy throw pillows that Tony had recently purchased. "Sometimes he can't hear things."

"Did you check his file?" Wanda sounds amused.

"I did," he frowns. "There's nothing there."

Wanda picks up three throw pillows from where they've been uncomfortably resting and levitates them across the room. "Maybe they keep it out of his files."

Clint freezes. He wrote it down on the file himself. Tony or someone must've removed it because he didn't want his weakness exploited.

Pietro sighs. "He's the only normal one, you know? Apart from Widow. He loses time too. Sometimes he walks into a room and doesn't know how he got there. He forgot the name of his dog. Too many knocks on the head, even human healing can't combat it."

Clint slowly walks out of the room, eyes wild. He didn't know how the kid had noticed all this in the short span of time he'd been here, but it was definitely getting harder to hide the fact that he was so painfully human and old and he was a liability.

**XxX**

Over the next few days, Pietro watches him silently.

He notices the way Clint tenses up around Vision, the way he doesn't laugh so much, the way he grins at Widow.

He also notices that Clint always has his comms left in, and how he doesn't ignore him anymore. Pietro narrows his eyes at this.

So one day, he approaches Widow, who eyes him with a warily. "Yes?"

"Something's wrong with Clint's hearing." He says firmly. "What happened?"

Widow has never seen such a look of innocence about the snarky asshole. "Why do you want to know?"

Pietro makes an airy gesture he'd send Tony do before. "Reasons."

Widow looks at him even more closely. "Bullshit," she laughs. "You like him."

Pietro knows better than to deny it. "So I do," he shrugs, but is barely able to get the next sentence out before she has him shoved against the wall.

"If you hurt him, and I'll make eight bullets in your chest look harmless," she hisses, before steps back and straightens his shirt as if nothing had taken place.

Pietro meets her eyes squarely.

"If you want to know what's wrong with Clint, you should ask him," She pats Pietro's shoulder as she turns back to her movie. "It's not my place to tell."

Pietro raises an eyebrow, but gets the message and walks away, questions racing around his head.

He turns into the workshop, and, as luck would have it, finds Clint seated at the end, massacring a wooden block. Splinters fly everywhere, and there's another stack of wooden blocks that makes it seem as if Clint would continue to pulverise them for an hour.

In between blows, Pietro calls out, "Clint?"

The axe immediately stops, and Clint turns around to see him. "Yo."

"Can I talk to you for a minute?" Pietro asks nervously, trying not to stare at Clint's bare chest, but not finding anywhere else a good place to look. Instead, he notices the comms still in Clint's ear.

"Sure thing, kid," Clint grins, and puts the axe down, pulling on a baggy t-shirt. The t-shirt had a picture of a dancing coconut tree saying, "I'm coco-NUTS for you!"

Pietro wondered not for the first time why he even liked this stupid man.

"What's up?"

Pietro snaps back into it. "So something's up with you, don't lie."

Clint tenses, and this time Pietro realises he's struck a nerve. "Why?"

Pietro shrugs. "I want to know, old man."  
Clint walks closer to him and stares him down, despite Pietro being the taller one. Pietro stares back.

"On one condition," Clint says, defeated. "You do not laugh."

Pietro nods vigorously. Clint sighs and sits down heavily, his hands twitching. "When I was younger, my father was...well, in short of a larger word, abusive. And he like punish me. It ah, wasn't so fun."

Pietro's eyes dim; he nods in understanding. Clint thinks of the orphanages they grew up in when their parents died. He wonders how many were like his father.

"Later, while fighting this god awful fucktard called the Clown, I made a stupid move and let him get my arrows and he put them in my ears and I couldn't hear. I can now but not so much, you know how it is. I'm a patchwork is scars and most of them don't heal."

Pietro steps to him and, taking a leap of faith, pulls him into a hug. He winds his fingers around his neck and leans his chin on his shoulder. "That's why you didn't like the running," he says, "and why you leave your comms in. They help with hearing?"

Clint nods, and seems to shrink in size.

"Developed by Tony. I owe him a lot."  
Pietro nods, and shame floods his face. "I'm sorry for-"

"Don't be," Clint looks up at him and smiles, and Pietro's heart skips a beat. "It's fine, you didn't know."

Pietro shakes his head firmly. "Not it is not. Saying it's okay because you didn't know is an excuse. You should not treat people like that," Pietro gives him a small smile. "I'm sorry."

Clint looks at Pietro with new eyes, and wonders how the kid would react if he grabbed him and just kissed him, right there and then. "Thanks, kid."

"So would you mind if I took you out for lunch," Pietro whispers into his ear. "As an apology, of course."

Clint laughs softly. "Only an apology?"

The kid pulls back; grins at him. "Well, if you want it to be something else," he pauses for emphasis. "I'm cool with that too."

Clint beams. "First one to the car pays!" He shouts, and Pietro immediately takes off.

When he gets to the car, Pietro is fuming at him. "I realised what you said too late."

Clint slides into the front seat and laughs delightedly. "So who's the one with hearing problems?"

Pietro's startled laughter was the best sound Clint had heard in days.


End file.
